Osun: three years after

The November 16 Anambra election echoes the Uba brothers’ Anambra selection of 2003.

That itself echoes the Ekiti Ido-Osi electoral rerun travesty of 2010, which ties back to the “original sin” of 2007: the most audacious electoral heist in Nigerian history, in which Osun, with other states, fell to brazen electoral robbers.

On Anambra, a later revisit; since the children of electoral perdition are still at their game. Emotions run sky high; and the jury is still out on how the self-destruct game would end.

But a grand irony seems to have escaped the dramatis personae: the champions of impunity in 2007, now scamper to the courts as victims of impunity in 2013!

But thanks to the Court of Appeal, under Justice Isa Ayo Salami. From the ashes of that electoral nadir of Osun 2007, with all its self-assured paralysis, sprung new hope three years later in 2010, boasting legitimacy-fired vitality.

Another grim irony: Justice Salami, for the temerity to save, from themselves, non-democrats in Nigeria’s troubled democracy, was conked with heinous conspiracy that challenged his honour and integrity. But he triumphs today by the notorious fact that yesteryear emperors of impunity now cower before the courts – Justice Salami’s sacrosanct instrumentality to bring felons of all hues to book – for protection!

The Rauf Aregbesola government in Osun, child of judicial integrity, birthed on 27 November 2010. That government would be three years tomorrow.

Like the famous 7up radio commercial, the difference would appear clear: paralysis from electoral robbery versus release from sound electoral mandate. Again, that difference appears lost in the present Anambra imbroglio!

On the Osun story, two personal reminiscences. In 2008, Sola Fasure, then The Nation Editorial Page editor, lost his dad. At the funeral reception at Ilesa, it was a tug of war between beggars, hungry, aggressive and cheeky, and guests; with the beggars at the ready to sweep the remnants off the guests’ table! That was paralysis ala the ancien regime!

This year, 2013, Bolade Omonijo, a member of The Nation Editorial Board, also lost his mum. Destination: the same Ilesa. Sure, there were still beggars. But that desperation to snatch the guest’s plate at the burial reception was gone. Between the ancien regime and the present order, the difference is clear!

That, of course, should be the trite: a government with legitimate mandate, after a free and fair poll, knows it floats or sinks on the strength of its service to the people. That would appear the hallmark of the Aregbesola government, as it goes on an overdrive to make up for the paralysis of the Olagunsoye Oyinlola era.

Yet, the governor has not been without controversy, most of it tantamount to what is called “unforced error” in tennis; or “own goal” in football, despite his wide canvass of near-excellent service delivery.

The governor’s “principal sin” is zest for his Islamic faith, hardly a crime! Many growl his beard is shaggy and rather un-gubernatorial. Others in pious rage point at his going for sukuk, the Islamic loan, as evidence that Mullah Rauf wouldn’t rest until he had Islamised Osun. Others foam in the mouth at his penchant for donning the Islamic skull cap, even at official functions.

Indeed, a particular commentator, playing the prescriptive emperor, virtually ordered the Ogbeni (a moniker which, by the way, many deem too plebeian for high gubernatorial office!) to go shave his beard since, according to him, it robs negatively on people; and also told him to junk his school reclassification policy and go hand over schools back to their missionary “owners”, in proud and combative ignorance of extant situation in Osun.

Another bellyached over the metaphysics and alchemy of governance and concluded, rather sadly and gravely, that though no Islamisation “smoking gun” existed, the governor remained legitimately charged, by his body language!

Of course, all these are happy ammo for the governor’s opponents who, mercilessly routed at the realm of ideas, have happily embraced the high passion of lies and blackmail as their last stand.

But the governor need not bother about columnists as Rip Van Winkles. The original Rip snored for 20 twenty years only to jerk awake, and find things irreversibly changed! Merchants of lies and blackmail too are fated to irrelevance.

The inevitable is that many years hence the Aregbesola government would be remembered by generations, many of them not even born now, for its ambitious infrastructure programmes and projects, aimed at vaulting Osun from the socio-economic backwaters it had sunk into, after years of neglect, from the pristine hub of commerce in the Yoruba heartland.

The tell tale of such stunning modernisation is already on and will, as day follows night, signal the political death and un-rued burial of many.

But what would really stand Aregbesola out in Osun, as did the legendary Chief Obafemi Awolowo in the old Western Region, is his audacious bid to fix the Osun infrastructure of the mind.

In a state hitherto regarded, by many, as the rumour capital of the globe (a euphemism for mass ignorance and susceptibility to mindless elite manipulation), an “Islamist-governor” has given everyone, Christian, Muslim and African traditional adherent, a sense of religious projection, in the best tradition of religious equity.

Not only that: he has attacked educational reforms in Osun with a revolutionary zeal, second only to Awo’s much-abused free primary education policy turned much-revered development elixir, that earned the modern Yoruba paterfamilias the moniker of Ebudola (Yoruba, for scorn-turned-praise).

Now, if Mullah Rauf wanted to Islamise his state, why would he give Osun children and youth the key to unlocking their minds with sound education, and making their own informed choices, like the odyssey of the cave man in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave? A mind hitherto chained to darkness in a cave, got exposed to lamp light, then to electricity and finally to the full grandeur of the sun! What release!

So long for the manifest idiocy of emotional Islamisation!

The glaring fact: Aregbesola has the courage to take risks on the strength of his conviction. The sukuk as developmental loan is a good case. The emotional army was priming their big guns until Westminster that brought Christianity to Nigeria, as part of its own cultural imperialism en route to colonisation, announced with glee that London was ready to be sukuk’s global leading mart!

Sukuk would not turn Canterbury into Mecca any more than it would Islamise Osun roads, bridges, power plants, hospitals and other developmental projects it is put to. It is only an investment window!

So far, so good – and the Osun renaissance could not have come at a better time, after nearly eight years of paralysis. But it is time the governor also tampered risk-taking with tact, by shunning needless controversies.

The last three years have been nothing short of phenomenal. But Osun needs no less than eight years – and more of progressive tinkering – in its developmental race against time

Ogbeni Aregbesola can achieve this by staying focused and shunning needless controversies.